I’ll say it once, I’ll cackle it a thousand times: children are far better at processing fear than adults. They are afraid of more things — everything is so big and new — but they deal with the fact that something scared them better than an adult. We just forget that.

Case in point.

Two good friends of mine from back up Chicago way, Val and Allen, were on a family road trip through the south and made a one night stop at my place on Friday. I was eager — EAGER! — to show off my spooky cabin-ish house.

Val and Allen brought their not-quite-four-year-old daughter Penny. Penny liked the skulls and decor. She liked the woods and singing frogs outside. Penny was very keen on seeing our fireplace in action, so I started a fire up, we procured beverages, and gathered front of the cheery roar.

We all listened to some Edgar Allen Poe audio fiction.

Now this is the point. Val and Allen present the world in a very straightforward manner to little Penny. And, with a little reassurance, she takes it all in very well. When she asked me how my adopted cat lost her eye, Val and Allen had me tell the disturbing story to her straight.

And so it was with Poe.

We started with Iggy Pop reading “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Penny was frightened and fascinated by Iggy’s eerie voice. She wanted to know every detail about “the man with the one eye.” We filled her in.

Then Christopher Walken read “The Raven”. Penny sat next to me, again hooked on the spooky cadence, with me giving her the occasional play by play and answering questions. “Oh! The raven is in his house?” “Why does he keep saying that?”

My literary partner was three years and some change, and I don’t remember having as much fun listening to Poe.

The little one went to bed, head full of dismembered bodies, evil eyes, and ill omens. And how did it effect her? The next day she asked her dad to tell her again about the raven and the man with the one eye. I think we formed some good brain wrinkles that night.

When they got back home, Val and Allen asked Penny what her favorite part of the whole vacation was. She said, “The scary house that was not haunted.”

I’m a portrait! Look, look! The wonderfully phantasmagoric-minded Mel Addams made this for me. You can read their story why here.

I’ll break the image down, because I want to illustrate just how much thought and effort went into this. Mel saw that I had some lovely paintings of both Poe and Lovecraft on my wall, by Michael Bielaczyc.

I once talked about the notion of Impostor Syndrome, the insidious doubt that you don’t belong or that some success was not really earned, and how that can pop into anyone’s head, from beginning to novice to the most successful. Mel, in their glorious and kind wisdom, thought a good safeguard would be for me to look up and see my face with a couple of my heroes. They put my face to the same stylized tilt as the Bielaczyc paintings. And they pieced me together from bits of things I’ve provided online over the years.

Years ago, I played around with photo shop to make this image of me.

The one-eyed cat on the left, in the portrait, is my actual one-eyed cat, Raven. I adopted her in Montreal and she has been my home scrivnomancy familiar ever since.

The served hand on the right, is my workplace familiar. I picked it up one Halloween, when I lived in Oslo. It’s been my office mascot ever since (in three countries). And was once a regular character feature on my twitter.

And finally the top hat. It’s actually my leather top hat, purchased from a vendor, many GenCons ago. The eyeball patch I got from Grichels. The hat has taken on a life of its own. Players and readers have gotten to know me by the image. It’s featured in the live twitch dev-stream I do for The Secret World, called The Streaming Ones.

The hat has even taken on surreal digital life within The Secret World game itself. Behold, Nyarlatophat!

Also featured are a coat and vest of mine.

And there you have it. The gift Mel gave me, besides their amazing talent, was an image that I unknowingly got to collaborate on making (by taking pieces of me). That’s a swell gift to someone who likes composing visual things (but with no real technical skill for it). It means the fiddling I did with photoshop or the eyeball I had attached to a hat, and the paraphernalia I surround myself in, all contribute to a sweet image. THANKS, MEL!

Would you like to hear a story? This is a good one. And very short. This is the story and the story goes: Simon meets Janie D. at work. She tells him who hurt her. She smiles. This is love. This is rigor mortis.

My first novel, Strangeness in the Proportion, is now available in print. This makes me more than a little giddy, more than a little, “Cousin Larry, we so happy, we do the dance of joy.” Why not buy a copy and share my giddiness?

If we can define power as the degree one affects the universe — and if we agree that buying a book by a mega-popular author (say Steven King) has less effect on his universe (by degrees) than a less popular, less accomplished author — then we can conclude that buying Strangeness may just be the most powerful purchase you make this year.

Not so long ago, I was somewhat worried that no one would like Simon and his scalpels and head full of undead crows and cadaver romancing. But people seem to be falling for the little weirdo. That almost feels more important to me than whether or not they liked the book. Maybe I’m just attached. We’ve been co-living in my head for over half a decade.

I recently ordered some business cards. I can’t resist Poe references. And you should respect my addiction.

To the Russian Clive Barker fans who found this blog via the internet search term “сенобиты” — I say to you:

Writing a novel is the agony of going against every hard-wired stitch of the cross-hatched, multi-billion-year-evolved survival instinct programming of immediate gratification. Writing a haiku, by comparison, is the bliss of being that much closer to the primal, monkey-brained drive that says, “Yes, I want to eat that snake’s head. I want to eat it now!”

I had recent occasion to experience both. I placed in a novel contest and a haiku contest.

Strangeness in the Proportion
Several years ago, I won a novel contest. Between the then and the now, on and off, I worked on various drafts of this novel with the publisher (White Wolf Games) and my editor, James Lowder. It was hard. Really hard. Nearly busted my brain a few times. Nothing for respect for anyone that has gone through this process.

This winter, my big hunk of scrawling became available. My mutant child is all ready for company. It’s called Strangeness in the Proportion. It is available, currently, as a 17 part serial over at White Wolf’s site.

It’s received some nice comments so far. I will definitely feed it an extra bucket of fish heads tonight.

Poe Haiku
In my convalescence, as I strained foreign objects out of my liquid brains and funneled it back up my nose (using reversed Egyptian techniques), I wrote something much smaller, entering a contest calling for Edgar Allen Poe themed haiku. It was bliss. A quick burst of creativity, pen scratching, emailing, and then input and accolades.

“And I held illimitabledominion over all.”Applause.Red Death sits.Black Death begins.

They made a mistakeT’was sharp senses, not madnessThe heart beats. It waits.

I thank the practice I’ve received from lots of recent twitter-story (short stories in 140 characters) writing. Both forms call for the same discipline in implied story (to be discussed in an upcoming post).

The Present Bias
The human current human brain really isn’t any different than the one that sat in the skulls of our grandaddies n’ mommies who hunted mastodon. That brain still has trouble with the concept of the future. It’s predisposed to the now. That is the Present Bias. Big projects like novels go against that. So when is it worth transcending? When is it worth playing to the strengths of the now (and taking glorious 4th…er…half of 4th)?

Growing pains in the skull, right along the faultiness of the suture-cracks, that’s what you have to look forward too, but the agony is just a reminder that you are on to something better, bigger, if only can keep your focus and—

Mmmmm…snake brains…

Google Me…No One’s Looking…
While we’re on the subject of places stained by my ink, let me list some other places that still feature my writing (as a way of assessing myself in the new year, a time to make resolutions of transcending snake brain mastication).

Over at the This Endless Present (an online publication dedicated to dreams), you can read about a nightmare I had (it’s in the first part of the 3rd issue). I don’t know whether to call the piece fiction, or what I should do with it. I woke up, during my first month in Norway, and jotted it all down, as fast as I could go, before I could forget. I don’t normally have nightmares (especially ones that follow so vivid a narrative). I like it though. There was no overactive self-editor, as I was half asleep. I just wrote.

And still (Still!) I have a short story up at BloodlustUK.com, titled “Varmints”. It is the first thing I ever had published. Be gentle.

These days, my daytime gig is writing video game dialogue and story. For the last year and a half, I’ve worked for Funcom (in Norway and now in Montreal). I write for the Age of Conan MMO, mostly in the Rise of the Godslayer expansion, and on some upcoming material.

Very recently, I’ve been playing with an idea for an anthropamorphic animal story, but not a kids story. I think it has its roots in childhood viewings of the The Secret of NIMH and Watership Down.